iPhoto can't open, and I can't copy/paste iPhoto Library to make a backup

Thank you very much.

I'll look into these things.

About the external hard drive:

Was trying to google info about it, but I get lost (I'm really inexperienced).
It's an orange Lacie "rugged" (2 years old).

When I open the hard drive info (command+i), it says "Format: Mac OS - extended (Journaled)".

Cool.

By the way. ChronoSync offers a set of different ways to syncronize or back up files.

Do I understand it right if I think that what I need is a so called "left-to-right blind backup" in order to save my pictures from a black hole in the universe? (left being external hard drive, right being my iMac).

One alternative is a bootable backup (whatever that means), among many other alternatives of syncronization.

I'm terribly afraid of doing wrong choises and to loose all pictures.

Great.

I chose the simple left-to-right back up.
So far, it really seems to work.

Again, thanks a lot!

Now, with all pictures on my harddrive, I guess the next step is to organize one or two backups on new, healthy hard drive(s) ?
And maybe start using Time Machine?

Getting the library out of the failing external hard drive worked fine, using ChronoSync.

But when I imported the library via "ChronoSync", something strange happened; it had imported two different iPhoto libraries, that overlapped partially in a certain period of time, hence a lot of duplicates. That is weird, because iPhoto has always only referred to one library on that very same external hard drive.

Anyway, I started to merge these two libraries into one, using "iPhoto Library Manager" to exclude duplicates, and to take care of the whole thing. This seemed to work fine, but after 5 hours, "iPhoto Library Manager" stops the merging because there is not enough space on the iMac hard drive.

I am wondering why it suddenly needs more space for merging two libraries that are already at the iMac hard drive.

An update ofthe problem:

First I used the program to delete the duplicates. Then I have tried to merge the one library into the other (a very time-consuming task, not a problem for me, I just hope this is normal. It is quite a large task, I am a bit confused to what is what, but I know that before I started to eliminate the duplicates-there was about 420 GB og films&fotos, I would guess that roughly a third of this was duplicates. )

During the merging (lets call the libraries A and B), there occurred problems with lack of space, I freed as much space as I could. Before merging I controlled the computers storage, and I can now see that the film and foto storage have increase a lot and there is only 16 GB available on the computer. Does the merging work in a manner that it copies the photos into the desired library, but still keeps the original? (So that B appears as a duplicate in A) If so. Would a solution be to split the one library into several, and merge them into the main library one by one, each time deleting the library that has been merged into the main library?

And how do I solve the problem as it is now? In some way I must terminate the merging task. But will this jeopardize anything? Or will it simply be so that the photos that have been merged already are in the main library (e.g. A is now (A+ parts of B)). And in it this way I can proceed by the same manner as before: I use the software to eliminate the duplicates between the “new” main library (A+ parts of B) and the one I originally wanted to merge into the main library (B).

I hope this somehow makes sense, sorry for the tedious explanation.

I appreciate all the help!